The Welsh name for Barmouth is Abermawddach, or in everyday speech Y Bermo. The English version is a corruption of the older Welsh Abermawdd. In the late 18th century the town grew up around shipbuilding and a small harbour that exported wool from the sheep farms inland. The seaside resort era arrived in the early 19th century, but Barmouth was already half-formed when the trade reached it; new guest houses appeared, but no grand promenade or pier was ever built. The German philologist Friedrich Althaus wrote in 1889 that climbing Cadair Idris was the chief object of most visitors, and the town existed mostly to send them up it. There is something to that even now. Many people arrive in Barmouth, look at the mountain, and disappear into the hills behind for the day.

Above the town, on a hillside reached by a steep zigzag path, sits Dinas Oleu - the Citadel of Light, four and a half acres of gorse and rock with a view of the bay that justifies the climb. In 1895 a Barmouth resident named Fanny Talbot donated Dinas Oleu to the newly founded National Trust. It was the very first piece of land the Trust ever acquired, given by a woman who corresponded with Octavia Hill and believed the working people of the town needed somewhere to walk and breathe. Talbot's gift set the pattern for what the Trust would become. The Citadel of Light is still there, still free, still looking out to sea, and the National Trust now holds nearly a quarter of a million hectares in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Down in the town two strange small buildings remain from earlier centuries. Ty Gwyn is a medieval tower house, built in the 1460s and reputed to have hosted Jasper Tudor when he was plotting the campaign that would put his nephew Henry VII on the throne. Ty Crwn is the round prison, a low circular lock-up built in 1834 with two cells, one for men and one for women, divided so that the prisoners could not see one another. It served until the 1830s prison reforms. Both buildings sit a short walk from the harbour. They are small in a way that early Welsh architecture often is: domestic in scale, designed for the people who actually lived here rather than for the gentleman tourists Wordsworth represented. Panorama Walk above the town offers another view; the route was developed for Victorian visitors and is still maintained as a Grade II registered historic landscape.

Barmouth Harbour hosts the start of the Three Peaks Yacht Race, an event that requires crews to sail from here to Fort William while three of their members run up Snowdon, Scafell Pike, and Ben Nevis along the way. It has been held annually since 1977, an exercise in coastal seamanship and lung capacity that begins with the boats rocking gently against the harbour wall and ends, days later, on the summit of Britain's highest mountain. The town also hosts the Barmouth Beach Race each October, a motocross event on a temporary course built across the sand. Two hundred riders. Free admission. The kind of weekend event that a small Welsh town does extremely well: bring everyone in, give them a show, and clean up the beach on Monday.

Harold Lowe was born in Barmouth in 1882 and became fifth officer of the RMS Titanic. He was the only officer to take a lifeboat back into the wreckage looking for survivors. He found four men alive. He died in Barmouth in 1944 and is buried in the town. Tommy Nutter, born here in 1943, reinvented the Savile Row suit in 1960s Soho and dressed three of the Beatles for the cover of Abbey Road. Bill Tilman, mountaineer, sailor and explorer, lived in Barmouth for most of his later life before being lost at sea in 1977 on a voyage to Antarctica. The Russian-born German philologist who praised Cadair Idris in 1889, the Lake Poet who praised the view, the Titanic officer who came back for survivors - they all stood somewhere on the curve of Barmouth's seafront and looked at the same estuary. The town is small enough that you can find the houses where they lived. Most are still occupied.